linkage symbol and compound marker

Tue Feb 7 22:23:30 UTC 2012

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the clarification.  I just wanted to  know if the compound marker
and the linkage symbol  work differently in order to explain them to
students in my class. I am not serious about calculating MLUs on main tiers,
too. I teach them how to run MOR and MLU on %mor after teaching how to
calculate MLUs on main tiers simply because they seem to understand what MOR
does better.

Yuriko

From: Brian MacWhinney [mailto:macw at cmu.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 3:26 PM
To: chibolts at googlegroups.com; Yuriko Oshima-Takane
Subject: Re: linkage symbol and compound marker

Dear Yuriko,

   The plus is used to mark the pieces of real compounds that are created by
productive compounding

processes.  The underscore is used for combinations of words or word pieces.
The form Baby_Allison

is correct, because this is not a compound.  Of course, you could also have
Baby Allison with spaces,

but having Baby_Allison reflects the unitary nature of the combination.  

   In terms of MLU, I would not take any analysis that uses the main line
instead of the %mor line seriously.

However, your question is still valid in either case.  For both the main and
the %mor line, compounds are

treated as multi-morphemic.  I think that decision is clearly correct.
However, words with the underline are

treated as monomorphemic.  This could be questioned.  The problem is that
words with the underline

form a real grab bag of different structures and it is not clear how to
treat them all.  If you wish, you could 

change the delimiter set for MLU to include the underscore and then they
would be treated as 

multimorphemic.  Or you could decide to transcribed as "Baby Allison"  or
even "baby Allison".

-- Brian

On Feb 6, 2012, at 7:55 PM, Yuriko Oshima-Takane wrote:

Dear Brian,

Could you please let me know how the linkage symbol " _"  is different from

the compound marker "+"?  I am presently teaching  the CHAT transcription
and CLAN

programs in my course and have tried to run MLU (on main tier) and MAXWD on
the

same transcripts with the linkage symbol (Baby_Allison) or with the compound
marker

(Baby+Allison) to understand the difference between the two symbols.

Baby_Allison/Baby+Allison occurs 6 times in the test transcripts (please see
attached).

I got slightly different MLUs as well as MAXWD output (see below). For the
MAXWD, the linkage

symbol"_" is counted as one letter. What about MLU counts? I thought both
cases are

counted as one morpheme word but apparently not. Please let me know why.

Thanks.

Baby_Allison

> MLU +t*CHI -t%mor    @

mlu +t*CHI -t%mor @

Mon Feb 06 19:24:38 2012

mlu (03-Jan-2012) is conducting analyses on:

  ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *CHI;

****************************************

>From file <c:\CHILDES\psyc561\data\lab12012\Alisson22testmlu#3.cha>

MLU for Speaker: *CHI

  MLU (xxx, yyy and www are EXCLUDED from the utterance and morpheme
counts):

                Number of: utterances = 22, words = 40

                Ratio of words over utterances = 1.818

                Standard deviation = 0.936

Baby+Allison

> MLU +t*CHI -t%mor     @

mlu +t*CHI -t%mor @

Mon Feb 06 19:25:10 2012

mlu (03-Jan-2012) is conducting analyses on:

  ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *CHI;

****************************************

>From file <c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#4.cha>

MLU for Speaker: *CHI

  MLU (xxx, yyy and www are EXCLUDED from the utterance and morpheme
counts):

                Number of: utterances = 22, words = 43

                Ratio of words over utterances = 1.955

                Standard deviation = 0.976

> maxwd  +t*mot      @

maxwd +t*mot @

Mon Feb 06 19:41:29 2012

maxwd (03-Jan-2012) is conducting analyses on:

  ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *MOT;

****************************************

>From file <c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#3.cha>

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#3.cha": line 13:
12 characters long:

baby_allison

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#3.cha": line 24:
12 characters long:

baby_allison

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#3.cha": line 41:
12 characters long:

baby_allison

Mon Feb 06 19:40:22 2012

maxwd (03-Jan-2012) is conducting analyses on:

  ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *MOT;

****************************************

>From file <c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#4.cha>

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#4.cha": line 13:
11 characters long:

baby+allison

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#4.cha": line 24:
11 characters long:

baby+allison

*** File "c:\CHILDES\PSYC561\DATA\LAB12012\Alisson22testmlu#4.cha": line 41:
11 characters long:

baby+allison

Yuriko

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